The Anatomy of Melancholy

Saturn, a man, castrated himself and ate his own children: a cruel tyrant driven from his kingdom by his son Jupiter, as good a god as he was—a wicked, lecherous, contemptible king of Crete, whose rapes, lusts, murders and villainies would fill more than a whole volume. Venus, a notorious prostitute, as freely available as a barber’s chair, the whore of Mars, Adonis and Anchises, is a great goddess like the rest, just as celebrated by their poets; and there are many more like them.

These gods, so fancifully and foolishly invented, “they celebrate with ceremonies, hymns and songs”: their misdeeds, “sorrows and joys, loves, angers, marriages and the begetting of children,” as Eusebius rightly censures them. Weddings, merriment and mourning, loves, angers and quarrels they celebrated in hymns and sang about in their ordinary songs, as though publicizing their villainies.

But consider further accounts of their origins. When Romulus was killed in the senators’ revolt, Julius Proculus, to pacify the people, announced that Jupiter had taken Romulus up into heaven, and that the Romans should therefore worship him as a god for ever afterwards.

Syrophanes of Egypt had an only son whom he dearly loved. He set up the boy’s statue in his house, and his servants adorned it with crowns and garlands to soothe their master’s anger when he was enraged. Thus, little by little, the son came to be worshipped as a god. Semiramis did the same for her husband Belus, and the emperor Hadrian for his favourite Antinous.

Flora was a rich prostitute in Rome, and because she made the commonwealth her heir, her birthday was celebrated long afterwards. To make it a more acceptable holy day, they made her goddess of flowers and sacrificed to her among the rest.

The matrons of Rome, Dionysius of Halicarnassus relates, dedicated a temple to Women’s Fortune because Coriolanus abandoned his war at their entreaty. And a temple was erected to Bearded Venus because something had gone wrong with people’s hair; and so with the rest.

The citizens of Alabanda, a small town in Asia Minor, wanted to curry favour with the Romans, who were then fighting Perseus of Macedon in Greece and inspired fear in those regions. They dedicated a temple to the city of Rome and made her a goddess, with yearly games and sacrifices. Thus a town of houses was deified: shameful flattery on the one side in offering the honour, and intolerable arrogance on the other in accepting it, on so base and absurd a pretext.